


Osteon

by entelognathus



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: Gen, Historical Figures, Horror, POV Second Person, Paleontology, Psychological Horror, historical fiction - Freeform, it is 4 am #winning, oh well i hope the Paleontology Creatures fandom enjoys my lunatic ramblings, this is esoteric as shit i dont even know how to properly tag this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25799812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entelognathus/pseuds/entelognathus
Summary: David Hosbrook Dunkle, a paleontologist and museum curator, is both fascinated and terrified by the sea monsters of the Paleozoic. After a fossil creature is discovered alive and well, he is possessed by a visceral, irrational fear of other extinct animals still being out there.Years later, his fears are realized.
Kudos: 17





	Osteon

**Author's Note:**

> I will preface this work with a disclaimer.
> 
> David Hosbrook Dunkle was a real person. His contributions to the field of paleontology are irreplaceable and inspiring even decades after his passing. This was written with the intention to pay respects to him in my own way. I should make it as clear as I can that this is not an attempt to deface his character or anything of the sort. It is simply my way of expressing my admiration for the man and his advancements in the scientific field by keeping his legacy alive.
> 
> While David was indeed real, the events that occur within this piece are most certainly not. I tried my best to infer all I could about him by poring through his academic papers, any sources I could find on his personal life, and even by attempting to reach out to what I suspected were living relatives. However, due to the cold and clinical nature of his publishings and lack of readily available information of his private life, it seems there simply aren’t enough pieces of the puzzle left for me to piece back together a full idea of what the man was like. As a result, the interpretation of David you see here is nothing more than a postulation on my part.
> 
> With this out of the way, I do hope you enjoy my little pet project.

You were 27 when they reeled in the first Coelacanth. It was a dead ringer for the fossils you (and everyone else worth their salt in your field, for that matter) thought to have been dead since the Devonian. By all accounts, it was just another lost taxon in a sea of others just like it. The proof was all there; the fossilized imprints carbon dated to 409 million years ago, present throughout all of fossil history until they disappeared at the dawn of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The exhibits in museums you worked for and the speculative articles on its physiology you worshipped as gospel all agreed that the Coelacanth was truly gone for good.

And yet, on that frigid day in 1938, its corpse was reeled in off the coast of South Africa. It was as if you had tried to rob the grave of a long-dead genus and found its cadaver still gasping for breath, just barely clinging on to life after it had been declared dead for multiple epochs. The discovery sent tangible waves coursing through the scientific community, and it wouldn’t be long until a colleague showed you the papers with elation you had never seen in him before. It was Christmas Eve when the headlines broke, and for the men in your field, it was nothing short of a Christmas miracle; the typically stony faces of your esteemed partners were lit up like a child on Christmas morning. This man in particular’s face was normally droopy and misshapen from years of squinting at fossil remnants and being hunched over a typewriter, almost reminding you of an old hound dog in a distantly tender kind of way, but today it was wrenched into a sickening kind of grin.

When you first saw the pictures in the newspaper, you almost felt ill. You did not reciprocate the feeling of pure glee that was radiating off your coworker--rather, it put a pit in your stomach unlike anything you had ever felt before. The first thing you noticed about the fish was its eyes; glazed over and glassy, conveying an emotion you couldn’t quite place, somewhere between raw, animalistic fear and deep-seated malice. Human, almost, you thought. It turned your stomach to ropes to look at, so you turned your eyes to the nice, neat block of text beneath the picture instead.

What you found wasn’t much more pleasant, either. Apparently, its tissues had exploded from surfacing, as its internal pressure crushed it alive when it ascended to shallower waters. It was as if the world itself didn’t want it to be here. You couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t supposed to see this. We were never supposed to comprehend the swirling maw of the abyss, nor the occupants of those trenches time forgot. Your hands grew clammy thinking about the implications, and you politely handed back the paper to your colleague with a stiff smile.

You hoped the Coelacanth would leave your thoughts as you continued with your work, but it did not. Its face, forever frozen in the sheer terror of having its primitive organs collapse from the pressure shift as it emerged into a harsh, alien world, clawed at your mind for hours and hours on end. You saw it in your peripheral vision, and the more paranoid side of your mind told you time and time again that when you turned around, it would be staring at you with its horrible teeth and pained expression and kill you for looking at it, for allowing it to live in your mind after it and its ilk tried to hard to remain undiscovered by man.

The dull thrum of the ceiling fan was in perfect sync with the throbbing headache you were quickly developing, until you could take no more and decided to take the rest of the day off on the grounds of sudden illness. Your superiors, thinking of this as unusual for you, decided to take your word on good faith and sent you home with worried smiles. You did not look them in the eyes on the way out, fearing that you would look into their faces and see the Coelacanth again, and they would flay you like an unsuspecting late Devonian invertebrate if you gave them so much as a glance.

The sun was still up, but you thought it best to go to bed as early as one could muster as you feared the toll of a night alone with your thoughts after everything. You thank whatever God would listen that you live nowhere near a body of water, that the seas of fossils in the midwest have long since dried up. There are no sea monsters that could get you here, you tried to tell yourself, practically pleading with your own mind to calm down like it was a petulant child. The restless sleep that followed and the nightmares that came with it said otherwise. The sun through your blinds as the night came to an end after hours of tossing and turning was normally a pest to you, a nagging sign that says “hey idiot, you failed to sleep again tonight,” but today you couldn’t be happier to see it in all its searing, unfeeling glory.

  
  
  


In the years that passed since the Coelacanth was brought to the surface, you had written dozens of academic papers about it and its fellow paleozoic brethren. It was your most valiant attempt to understand the creature which once frightened you so viscerally all those years ago and the strange world it called home. What began as an irrational fear festered into an honestly unhealthy obsession, an almost carnal urge to comprehend the terrors that once lurked the seas lost to time, the esoteric monsters of our past that may still be out there today, manifesting in an array of journals each more scrutinous and frenzied than the last.

Your dedication led you to become the curator of the museum you were once nothing more than a servile lackey of, but selfishly, you didn’t care in the slightest. All you cared about now was scouring the long gone seabeds of a time you were born 400 million years too late to see. You were beachcombing shores that no longer existed in a desperate attempt to comprehend its denizens, otherworldly creatures each more strange and beautiful than the last. To you, you weren’t Dunkle the timid and polite museum curator or Dunkle the shrewd, needlessly meticulous paleontologist, but rather Dunkle the monster hunter, the champion of the deep and vanguard of a forgotten frontier.

18 years after the Coelacanth’s untimely discovery, another beast from the Devonian was unearthed, subsequently ripping it from anonymity and forcing it into the spotlight that you imagined the Coelacanth was so furious about having been bathed in nearly two decades ago. Your colleague from all those years ago had passed by this point, but his daughter was the one to show you the newly discovered creature. She was a plump-faced middle aged woman with bright little sunken eyes and the personality of a persimmon pie, and showed you the beast with the same insufferable grin as her father with his newspaper back in the day. Uncanny. You decided you hated both of them.

The reconstruction of it seemed more like some archaic weapon or medieval instrument of torture than a fish. It was a 30 foot long juggernaut with bony blades in place of teeth and a pair of perfectly preserved eyes that seemed to look straight through you. For the first time since 1938, you felt true terror. You imagined its remains suddenly reanimating and cleaving the woman before you cleanly in two, leaving nothing but her abdomen severed so cleanly you could mistake it for a guillotine’s handiwork. It would then turn its head toward you, and the last thing you would see would be its maws closing down on your neck. You swallow hard and tell her it’s amazing, and she beams with joy, her saccharine smile making you positively nauseated. You did not eat lunch that afternoon.

A few hours later, the woman pounded on your door. You were just about to tell her to leave you be, as the same old migraine you had forgotten the sensation of was quickly returning and you were in no mood to hear her shrill voice for the second time today, but she let herself in anyway with the same syrupy grin as this morning. You put on the best cordial smile as you could muster, but even she could notice the tightness at the corners of your mouth.

She informed you with excitement she could barely contain that the paleontological community was considering naming the beast after you. Like the fearful ingrate you are, fear consumed you rather than gratitude. That’s great, you told her, and she smiles with a set of rounded, yellowish teeth. She beamed about how grateful she is that such a groundbreaking find is going to be named after a member of our very own staff, how much of an honor this must be for you. You smiled and nodded like an automaton, trying your absolute best to force the face of the beast, Dunkleosteus, she called it, out of your head. You quickly shut the conversation down to avoid having a breakdown in front of your staff member, and she waved at you with her stupid ham-like hands and her unbearable sugary smile before clambering out of your office and leaving you to the sound of silence once again, save for the rhythmic ticking of your wall clock. It did little to calm your nerves.

You worried that, like your old tormentor the Coelacanth, your new worst nightmare still lurks in seas untouched by the probing hands of man. Irate with you for exposing it before the eyes of the world it tried so hard to escape, its jaw descends upon you, bisecting you neatly and dragging you back down to the depths. You join it in the now ravaged seas of obsolescence it once found solace in before you and your foolish team of men trying to comprehend a world they weren’t meant to see had to come and ruin everything. You just couldn’t stop yourselves, turning your prying eyes to the one frontier you hadn’t already ruined, and now you must reap the consequences of your folly. You had chased the void left by the Coelacanth for too long now, and it was time for you to pay retribution for your ambitions, for attempting to understand monsters that were not meant to be understood.

The Dunkleosteus is still out there, you thought. Your face grew pale and your hands sweaty, and the prospect of taking your first sick day in 18 years grew more and more attractive by the minute. Your legs were glued to the floor, and you forced yourself to endure your abject terror under the oppressive glare of the office light until it was really time to go home. You were safe within the walls of the museum even if your heart felt ready to leap out of your throat. You were safe from its bony blades and sinewy body, you told yourself, swimming towards you with distilled primordial rage coursing through its veins, flinging itself onto dry land to turn you into mincemeat and return with you in its jaws to the depths from whence it came. 

Tick, tick.

**Author's Note:**

> There is more to come, I think. I will update this when I find the time or motivation.


End file.
